Forget my UAL, just save my IRA

Commentary: Where's the outrage at the spate of airline delays?

DavidCallaway

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- One of the fun features about the new community section that MarketWatch launched last year is that readers can see which articles are attracting the most comments.

As expected, some of the comments are sophisticated markets analysis, spawning active discussions about technical levels of stocks, bonds, commodities, etc. Some are merely flippant remarks, aimed at the authors of the stories and columns or other readers on the comment threads, a la the infamous Yahoo message boards. See community homepage

Only very few hit our filters for bad language or inappropriate statements, and fewer still -- less than 1% -- have to be removed for racism, sexism, or more often than both, anti-Semitism, for some reason.

And then there's this headscratcher, mentioned to me by a friend and long-time reader who has become an avid reader of our comments. It regards columnist Peter Brimelow's piece on Monday about how central banks might be providing physical gold to the markets and that India is buying it. See column

"Indians buying gold? First they kill Custer and now this?"

But aside from the occasionally startling lack of political correctness -- intended or otherwise -- a lot of these threads have solid entertainment value and in many cases, good learning value from some of the more sophisticated arguments. And for those of us in the newsroom, the size of the threads of the comments helps indicate which stories draw readers' passions more than others.

Political stories are always a draw, as everybody knows. So are markets stories. Both types can draw hundreds, in some cases thousands of comments in a day. So it was no surprise that our story Wednesday about Fed chief Ben Bernanke's testimony to Congress generated more than 500 comments by the time of this writing. See full story and comments

Another story that generated several dozen comments was a piece where readers complained that the Fed's campaign to cut rates has crushed their fixed-income investments and IRA, and threatened them with inflation.

But one of our other most read stories, about UAL Corp.'s United Airlines
UAL, +2.61%
grounding 52 long-haul aircraft, and causing havoc in several airports serving international flights, generated only five comments. See full story

This coming on a day that airline stocks, as represented by the Amex Airline Index
XAL, +1.32%
- down more than 20% since mid-February - fell another 3.5%. And amid news that the Air France-KLM
AFLYY, +0.51%
(003112) deal to by Italian airline Alitalia (0DOJ) collapsed -- again.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for the airlines in terms of canceling flights to check what seems to be routine maintenance. In United's case, the flights were cancelled or postponed because the airline found that safety inspections had not been performed on "fire suppression systems," which seems to be a fancy name for some form of fire extinguishers.

They followed other cancellations or postponements in the last week or two by American Airlines
AMR, -6.74%
Delta Airlines
DAL, +0.33%
and Southwest Airlines
LUV, +0.25%
which started the whole thing and sparked an audit of maintenance systems by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Have we become so immune to the delays and chaos at airports that this type of news stirs no emotion, other than from those of us actually stuck on runways or the airports when these events occur? Nobody wants to board a plane that they think might not be safe, so there is a degree of relief that the airlines are doing their due diligence here. But it's offset by the knowledge that they might have been cutting corners in the first place.

Of course, looking at comments on an Internet board isn't the most scientific way to judge public outrage. But from my own experience sitting in airports waiting for delayed flights to be checked for safety, or board a crew, or find a gate, or whatever, they sure seem in this case to fit in with that herd-of-sheep stereotype of the business and leisure traveler.

The airline industry is in too much peril from every direction, oil prices, terrorism, finances, etc., for us to be complacent about maintenance safety. It's enjoyed a good run of years without any major accidents. We need to keep the pressure on the airlines to keep their planes safe, whatever the cost, and to above all come clean with a public that is increasingly suspicious whenever it is told a story at an airport.

One of the five comments on the story was from a reader who claimed to be a passenger waiting for one of the delayed planes, Wednesday, and was told the FAA had ordered the plane grounded. United said it voluntarily disclosed the information to the FAA and grounded the planes itself.

Whatever the case, this is a story that bears much closer scrutiny than it is getting.

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